Seagate FreeAgent Go Review

I recently purchased a couple of the Seagate FreeAgent Go 160Gb external drives. A local store had a good deal on them. Here are a couple of my observations. The drive is in a very sleek case. I like the black with the yellow light on it. The case is plastic, but seems pretty sturdy. Oddly, there is no ventilation in the case that I can see. The plastic gets a little warm, but does not seem excessive. The drive has a weird USB cable. Plug one end into the drive, the other end splits and has two USB connectors for your computer. I called Seagate and asked why two and do they both have to be hooked up. Their support said the two connectors are to help with getting power on some systems. If the drive works ok with just one of the USB connectors plugged in, then they said that is fine. I guess since there is no external power supply, that is their way of working around getting enough power.

 I also tested out their FreeAgent sync software. This is very important – do not use this software if you are expecting it to make an exact copy of a folder on your system to the external drive. The sync software will NOT copy any hidden files OR hidden folders to the external drive. I called their support and as you can predict, got basically nowhere. What the heck is wrong with companies and supporting their customers these days. They tried to tell me this is the way sync is supposed to work and that is the way the XP operating system works. Well, it doesn’t. If you drag and drop a folder with hidden files from your computer to the external drive, any hidden files in that folder are copied. The Seagate FreeAgent sync software does not copy those hidden files or folders. Windows Media Player, for example, creates album art files as hidden files in your music folder. Thus, if you sync your music folder to the Seagate drive with their sync software, your album art is NOT copied to the drive. Support then tried to tell me that even if they could fix the software, it would take over a year to get a release out. I thought “Huh?” and lifted by jaw off the floor. I write software for a living. This is a reasonable request if not an all out bug in their software. I would never say what they said to me to my customers. I would get them a fix asap. I pushed a little harder and had no luck in getting support to consider this a bug. Told him the box says “With software that lets you take your desktop environment and all of your files to go.” I asked what “ALL” meant and found out it does not mean hidden which to me says that is false advertising. After that he basically hung up on me.

I will probably keep one of the drives because the hardware seems ok. Has a 5 year warranty which is nice. I’ll just delete the software and go continue using ROBOCOPY like I do with my other drives.

Summary – Drive seems good. Do NOT use the sync software if you are expecting exact copies. Do NOT expect Seagate to fix the software either. I thought they were a better company than that.